Fantastic Film Fest 2025 Review - Sword of Silence
Images courtesy of Original Spin.
Like most new films that make up the programming at the Fantastic Film Festival Australia, Sword of Silence comes pre-packaged with all the ingredients that make up the veneer of a cult midnight movie. The digitally degraded, black and white footage forms the surface of this experimental low-budget pseudo-fantasy film from director Reese Cleveland, which was chronologically shot over the course of five years, only on nights where the Queensland hinterlands were illuminated by a striking full moon. Sword of Silence believes in the strength of this ‘unique’ visual style to carry the film’s shortcomings, which unfortunately still manage to detract from the feature’s overall potential.
Like its visual style, Sword of Silence’s premise is ostensibly difficult to describe in words but becomes quite boringly simple once it is uncovered. The film follows the silent and mysterious ‘Figure in Black’ (Dimon Pilates), a Grim Reaper-resembling spirit who traverses the wilderness of a Dark Ages-esque fantasy setting with a mystical glowing white sword in the direction of an oracle-like voice that seeks to find them. The Figure in Black encounters many NPC-like companions who drip feed the bare-bones backstory of this world–in which darkness now envelops a world once lit with colour–most notably a bandaged man known as The Orc (Jonathan Trevillien, 1) and a seedy merchant known as The Rat (Sam Dixon). Conceptually, Sword of Silence is promising. It has many interesting creative characteristics–I quite liked the flash game-esque mumbling electronica voice of the oracle-like character, and the unique shooting schedule and lighting setup is a cute marketing hook. The premise, despite its lack of an interesting hook, is not even one that I would call inherently bad. Once you get past all this however, the film offers little emotionally, especially compared to its forebears.
Some weeks ago I went to an Artist Film Workshop screening of James Clayden’s Corpse (1982, 2), an experimental non-narrative feature following Australian gothic imagery of landscapes with occasional narration and footage of a Count Orlok-like figure roaming around suburbia, its conceptual imagery not unlike that of Sword of Silence. Unlike the latter however, Corpse organically evolves throughout the film–mostly in a tonal sense–you feel from the ever-changing imagery, music, and manner in which they are cut together that the film goes through an emotional shift from start to finish. Sword of Silence is unfortunately too preoccupied with the iconography and aesthetics of its better examples to emotionally develop on its own, and as a result there’s an emotional distance created between the film and its audience. This investment should not even necessarily depend on its characters (which, mind you, are very one note), but just on a narrative and filmic level, I never feel invested in the specifics of this world or the overarching sentiments it puts forward about how the world of the film “became dark”, something it contrasts with occasional colour footage, including the final shot of the film. This push and pull between the monochromatic darkness of the black and white, moonlit footage and the colour footage is neat, and would function in a short, but it is simply not enough to support a film of this length and ambition. Sword of Silence just had too little for what it is trying to pull off.
In lieu of an interesting experimental feature film with tonal evolution throughout like Corpse, Sword of Silence can’t help but be a stylistic pastiche right down to its core. Sam Dixon’s character especially got on my nerves in this regard, who is clearly channeling a Mad Max-esque side character with his snarky and slimy delivery while he skittishly mutters quasi-poetic dialogue about the state of the world. I found that this character and several other aspects of the film are evocative of other, better films, rather than anything emotionally original or interesting. Despite its experimental veneer, the films feels far more referential to mainstream narrative cinema, its premise and element of traversing landscapes being just shy of a simple Tolkeinian narrative and most characters owing their performance style and costuming to typical fantasy and sci-fi examples. This is not to sell short any talent in these departments, but I typically expect a film venturing out this far stylistically to have more to offer in both concept and execution on a directorial level.
I don’t mean to criticise alternative forms of religion or spirituality, but it is a shame that while the film is all too happy to thank “Australia for providing safe passage” and “Spirits far and wide for making yourselves known” in its credits that it does not acknowledge Indigenous Australians whatsoever. Indigenous oral storytelling methods often surround the idea that not only do we exist congruent with nature but that storytelling reflects the present as an echo of the past, and vice-versa. This idea of oral storytelling as an ever-present ‘echo’ is something even acknowledged in Corpse. Sword of Silence has a hollow eagerness to depict the spirits of the land and their connection to the landscape, but only on a surface level, with these storytelling traditions not utilised in meaningful ways and with no relationship to Country like in Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil (1993), a great example of these storytelling methods adapted to film. This is, however, to be expected of a film like Sword of Silence that has little interest in using its moonlit black and white footage and cult midnight movie aesthetics to compelling creative effect–as it stands, Sword of Silence treats the landscape of Australia as an empty canvas for pseudo-fantasy filmic expression with little emotional intrigue.
Cast members are from the credits of the film, but their characters may not match up as they are not named within the film itself.
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Sword of Silence is screening as part of Fantastic Film Festival Australia 2025. The festival runs from the 24th of April to the 16th of May. Check out the festival website for tickets and more info here.